by Jill Roe
One small sign of a change in her perceptions at this time was an increasing acknowledgement of Aboriginal Australia. Jean Hamilton had drawn her attention to Herbert Basedow’s sympathetic Knights of the Boomerang, and Miles told the American advocate of indigenous cultures Alice Thacher Post that Australia was coming around to her wise ‘way of thinking’. It was not something she could write knowledgeably about herself, but for all the feminist and nationalist reasons then coming into circulation, she was a strong supporter of Xavier Herbert’s ‘Capricornia’, still in limbo due to Stephensen’s business collapse.35
Early in 1936 Miles set All That Swagger aside and took up the re-discovered manuscript of ‘The End of My Career’, which she enthusiastically edited and revised. Written as a skit on My Brilliant Career, it now struck her as something that could stand on its own. The new version, dated 7 May 1936, she called ‘My Career Goes Bung’.36
At the same time, she began plotting to enter her work in the Prior Prize competition. To this end, she arranged to submit a ‘short-ish novel’ by ‘Miss Melvyn’ via Freda Barrymore in Townsville. Freda complied (while protesting against Miles’s penchant for secrecy). It was probably the manuscript of ‘My Career Goes Bung’ which went in, from the list of entries and pen-names published in the Bulletin, as ‘From Possum Gully’ by ‘Cross Stitch’. All That Swagger, blandly retitled ‘Advance Australia’, she entered herself. It went in a week later, submitted with the pen-name ‘Captain Bligh’, c/– Mr M. A. E. Gillespie.37
According to a diary entry for 24 June, she also sent several parcels of work to the United States and London. The package to the United States contained a letter, the manuscripts of ‘All That Swagger’, ‘My Career Goes Bung’, and Fullerton’s poems, and an unspecified magazine; while a similar assemblage containing the ‘My Career Goes Bung’ manuscript went to Guy Innes in London. She also sent ‘All That Swagger’ to the publisher Jonathan Cape.38
Three weeks later, on 15 July, Miles was astounded to learn that ‘Advance Australia’/All That Swagger had won the Prior Prize. There were over 230 entries in 1936, and according to the terms of the award, if suitable the winning manuscript would be published as a serial in the Bulletin on terms to be negotiated with the author, as well as receiving a cash prize.39
Announcing the award the following week, the Bulletin confirmed that All That Swagger, ‘this magnificent story’ by Miles Franklin, would appear shortly as a serial and would later be published simultaneously in book form in Australia, England and America. The prize was worth £100, the serial rights £50, and she would receive £100 against royalties on the book. As well, she would retain overseas rights. Miles feared that people would cut the serial from the Bulletin to make their own ‘books’, damaging sales of the conventionally published version, but with all else to her satisfaction, she began to excise some 40,000 words from the text to fit the available space in the magazine so the first of eight instalments could appear on 16 September.40
The congratulations flowed in. ‘Now you can swagger,’ telegraphed Inky and Winnie Stephensen. How exhilarating ‘to read such wonderful things about our cousin,’ wrote the Vallances from Murrumbateman, near Canberra. Mary Fullerton in London was quite blown away: ‘The splendid news lifted me right into the air.’41
The saga was, according to one of the judges, T. D. Mutch, Miles ‘at the zenith of her power’, her youthful promise magnificently fulfilled. Further, ‘In not one page is there to be seen any evidence of overseas influence. Only an Australian could have written it, and there has been nothing written like it except the Brent of Bin Bin novels.’42
One of the judges, Cecil Mann, also drew attention to the title, noting that swagger was ‘not a word that everyone likes’. In one of the first notices of the book version, the Sydney Truth began by referring to ‘an intentionally ugly name’. When she first heard the title, Henry Handel Richardson thought it bespoke some kind of defect in the writer, and later said it was ‘odious’: ‘Old Blastus was bad enough.’ To Lucy Spence Morice, Miles explained that ‘swagger’ simply meant ‘the bravado of the bravura days — a little dash, a little extra virility which carried them through hardship and loneliness’ — which is nearer today’s more positive connotations than those of the 1930s, when, for many readers, the word conjured up insolence and overbearing behaviour, or as in Australian folklore, a swagman.
The Bulletin serial ended on 4 November with a four-page Conclusion (previous instalments were ten pages). Reader responses to the saga of the Delacy family had been positive; and at least one reader thought the last chapter was the best of all. Here Danny Delacy’s grandson, the returning airman Brian, flies south in his ‘Nullah-Mundoley’ (the original Delacy breed of horse) over the road that had taken old Danny and Johanna weeks to traverse, to reclaim the vision of Australia which had sustained his forebears. Landing near the Gap, in sight of Canberra, Brian is uplifted by the view and by the thought of his unborn child. The Delacys may have lost the land, but it is in his bones, and he envisions a new race of men, a people unafraid to dream and worthy to occupy it: ‘Australia, the incredible feat!’43
One significant reader of the serial was Mary Gilmore, whose life was threaded through the Australian socialist tradition in a way Miles’s life was not, or not yet. For reasons not now easy to understand, Miles could not abide Gilmore, perhaps because she came from her own patch in south-eastern New South Wales, or because Gilmore’s celebrations of the Australian spirit were unencumbered by ambiguity or critical intent. But Mary, the older, more established writer (then in her seventies), was by contrast always generous to Miles, and never more so than in her response to All That Swagger:
I have not read anything so wise & fine as your All that Swagger. I would like to tell you how often it has wrung — not brought but wrung — the tears from my eyes . . . you don’t know how I have felt about your work for Australia . . . Proud of you, proud for the country that brought you forth, yours very humbly by comparison.44
Miles may have suffered from simple professional jealousy. The idea that Mary might become a Dame of the British Empire (DBE), as she did in 1937, provoked Miles on principle. Writing to Henry Handel Richardson in September 1936 in the belief that the FAW’s behaviour over the Kisch affair in November 1934 had put the kybosh on a DBE for Mary, she snorted, ‘A Dame eh? But then no great women writers are dames so perhaps it wd not have disgraced us so irretrievably after all.’45
Such Milesian swirls stimulated people, but perplexed them too. Urbane Ambrose Pratt, a Melbourne journalist, met Miles in Sydney in May 1936 and formed the view that she was obsessed, due to being too much alone with her own thoughts and the woman’s side of things: ‘When writing to me you have been writing to an abstraction’. Certainly, as Miles told Guy Innes at this time, isolation was the origin of her literary notebooks: ‘As I have no one to talk to, I have taken to writing in exercise books.’46
All That Swagger the book was still to come. Even after the first round of cuts, made immediately after she heard of her win, it was a big book, some 200,000 words on Miles’s own estimate, filling 500 pages in the first edition. With Mutch’s help, from July through September she worked over the proofs, and when advance copies finally became available on 14 November she expressed herself happy with the Bulletin’s production values. A fortnight later, on 24 November, the book appeared.
Stephensen was one of the first to congratulate her. His telegram the next day reads: ‘Delighted speechless magnificent swagger feat of bunyip virtuosity.’ A fortnight later, on 4 December, Miles apparently netted £30 in two hours at what, it has been suggested, was the first book signing in Australia, at Hordern’s department store. On 18 December, she wrote exultingly to Mary Fullerton: ‘You should see the pile of letters I have from many parts of Australia, all rejoicing like frogs in the rain after the drought in my book because it is real Australian, Australia under the skin, Australia from the inside.’ She was grateful for Hilary Lofting’s review in the
Bulletin on 23 December, which saw in Danny Delacy the embodiment of the Australian ‘fair go’, and placed him in ‘the august company’ of Soames Forsyte and David Copperfield.47
Overseas rights, so confidently anticipated in July, were another matter. By May 1937 the literary agent Innes Rose reported that the manuscript had been refused by all the top British publishers and he could do no more. So it was that Miles Franklin’s most successful book, which went through numerous editions during her lifetime and was until the 1970s her second best known work, was only once published outside Australia, by British publisher George Allen & Unwin in 1952.48
With scarcely any reviews appearing in the first weeks, Miles was becoming anxious about missing the Christmas market. Of some thirty known reviews, most came in the two months after Christmas. When they did, almost all were favourable, commending the integrity and vitality of the text: as the Melbourne Age reviewer put it, ‘the story rings true’. And although sales could not be compared with those of the prolific travel writer Ion Idriess or of F. J. Thwaites, a popular romance writer, 1664 copies had been sold by the end of the year and approaching 3000 by the end of February 1937. Miles Franklin was never so well off as in 1937, as the royalties rolled in, and each new edition sold well.49
It was from Adelaide, arguably then the least Australian of the state capitals, that the first of the few negative responses came. The Adelaide Advertiser said the novel was a disappointment, far too long and heavy to hold. ‘Mr’ Franklin employed too much padding. Indeed, All That Swagger’s length became the most frequently expressed criticism.50
A long review by Freda Barrymore in the North Queensland Register was most encouraging. Barrymore had privately promised to give All That Swagger a boost. But she did more than that; she touched on most of the aspects Miles herself would have deemed important in a book that was ‘essentially Australian in spirit’. Publicity agents were always on the lookout for the great Australian novel, but those who looked for big things from Miles Franklin when young would find much to satisfy them in this book — like an old Norse saga, Barrymore said. Its settings, especially the bush scenery in the early parts, were ‘the highest peak of her achievement’. Unusually, Barrymore noticed memorable treatments of Aborigines, asserting, though it may surprise modern readers, that Miles Franklin ‘stands with those who understand and sympathise with the original owners of this land’. She noted Danny’s ‘humanitarian quality’ and the characters Maeve, a young Aboriginal girl who becomes Johanna’s companion in the wilds, and the disabled boy Doogoolook, whom Danny rescues from a fire and who becomes his devoted retainer. Chinese people too are sympathetically drawn, as in the character of Cantonese-born goldminer Wong Foo.51
Barrymore also referred to Miles’s new and original sociological ideas, especially her view that the horse kept Australia free of a flunkey class and ensured the transformation of the peasantry: ‘No man can remain a peasant and go a-horse.’ She might have gone on to say, as did Bishop Burgmann in the Southern Churchman, that All That Swagger spans the era from the horse to the machine and that the era of the horse had now closed; but she put her finger on the fact that All That Swagger is the great novel of the horse era of Australian history, already then passed.52
Two other notices may be mentioned, more for what they say about contemporary expectations and values than as book reviews. Essaying ‘The Miles Franklin Country’ in March 1937, the Melbourne journalist John McKellar suggested that if the two criteria for the long-looked-for great Australian novel were a work embodying distinctively Australian characteristics and exhibiting features of national development, All That Swagger probably fitted the bill. A belated notice in the Australian Women’s Weekly, the Packer press’s triumphant captor of the women’s magazine market in the 1930s, though similarly laudatory, nowhere mentions the role of women in the saga of progress it commended — a sign, perhaps, of the timidity of the times, and an unexpected perspective on Miles Franklin, the becalmed radical.53
Success with All That Swagger immediately encouraged Miles’s hopes for her other projects. Nothing more was heard of My Career Goes Bung, but a month after the prize was announced, on 20 August 1936, she got out the manuscript of Cockatoos. It would need work to put ‘blood and tears’ into it, she decided. A fortnight later, on 4 September, William Blake wrote to Blackwood announcing that Brent now had time to work on ‘the missing volume’, that is, Cockatoos. Mary Fullerton was delighted to hear this, and the manuscript reached Blackwood a year or so later, but was rejected ‘for commercial reasons’; in particular, poor sales of Back to Bool Bool on the home market and limited returns on the colonial edition.54
Winning the Prior Prize enhanced Miles’s standing and increased her authority in the literary community. At an FAW party given in celebration, according to Marjorie Barnard, Miles gave ‘a wise and witty address’, and soon after, with the journalist Bartlett Adamson, she served as a judge at the annual play night of the Sydney Literary Society, of which she had been made a patron (as she was of the Propeller League) earlier in the year. And she was in some demand as a speaker, agreeing in August to address the Women’s Club on ‘Australia’s Greatest Woman’. That turned out to be Alice Henry’s heroine and now Miles’s literary touchstone, Catherine Helen Spence, and Miles spoke for an hour. ‘They seemed to find it stimulating,’ she remarked afterwards. Elsewhere she asserted that Spence should be on a stamp. (In 2001 Spence appeared on the $5 note commemorating the centenary of Australian Federation.)55
Given her increasing interest in historical biography, it was serendipitous that one of Miles Franklin’s more recent Sydney friends was Ida Leeson, Mitchell Librarian from 1932 to 1946, a friend of the Griffins and a rare soul, according to Miles. Miles loved working in the Mitchell, and no one knew its research collections better than Leeson. When invited to a meeting with Marjorie Barnard, Flora Eldershaw and Dora Wilcox, another Sydney writer, to prepare a women’s memorial volume for the forthcoming sesquicentenary of New South Wales in 1938, she agreed to write a chapter about Rose Scott. A changing focus was inevitable given her stage of life and cultural mission; and as with most things she undertook, her reflections are worthwhile. To Ambrose Pratt, an occasional biographer himself, she remarked upon the peculiar difficulties facing the biographer in Australia:
That field is still to be pioneered in indigenous literature and is more difficult even than the novel, for which some sort of a track has been blazed. The Australian biographer or autobiographer cannot be so uninhibited as those of Europe and America where there is more jungle to hide in. We are members of a small community which imposes small community decencies upon us.56
At the same time she was encouraging Kate Baker to write a biography of Joseph Furphy; and on hearing the unnerving news that Such Is Life was to be abridged for publication in London by Cape, she expressed a wish that they lived nearer each other so they could work on a biography together. It was an intriguing suggestion, which would soon enough bear fruit.57
Ambrose Pratt had dared to suggest that Miles Franklin was obsessed, and then that she was inhibited, despite what he called her ‘glinting’ mind. Pratt had the temerity to ask Miles what it was she was afraid of, really. He probably thought sex. Many have thought that, even in recent times. On this vexatious topic, Miles confessed to Alice Henry that nothing could now be further from her mind or interest even if it had once been a consuming subject, and that she had to be careful to remind herself that sex mattered enormously to the young. Evidently she had passed through her disgust with postwar mores in the metropolis and her own grief at the end of romance, and was now on her preferred path to immortality. Maybe all the evidence so carefully preserved — the letters, the diaries, the rejected manuscripts — in some way served as protection, or a projection of a self uneasily situated in a sexist society. A modern critic might suggest that much, and that the ecstatic approach to the landscape so prominent in All That Swagger was itself an erotic displacement; but this would need to be
seen against Miles’s naturalist approach to landscape writing. Maybe, it would be truer to say that Miles was an extrovert, but this too was problematic for the older woman in Australia then. Perhaps like most writers she feared to fail.58
No such complexity obscured Miles Franklin’s outlook on international affairs by 1936. If the 1930s were the devil’s decade, he was riding high in 1936, with the Nazi occupation of the Rhineland, Mussolini’s success in Abyssinia, the military rebellion against the new Nationalist government in Spain and the onset of the Spanish Civil War, the curtain raiser, as many feared, to a second world war. Miles knew, and frequently said, that Europe was a mess, and continued to support the Movement Against War and Fascism that had brought Kisch to Australia in 1934.59
Probably very few Australian women at that time were as well informed about foreign affairs as Miles Franklin, and not many Australians, male or female, as clear-headed. However, writing at year’s end to the Sydney poet-librarian Kathleen Monypenny, living in London, that Stephensen with retired businessman W. J. Miles had started a new political movement, the Australia First movement, Miles thought it was ‘very much needed’. But the theory it was based on was backward looking, and Stephensen’s ultra-nationalism soon headed in a fascist direction. His idea was that Australia should stay out of European imbroglios and put ‘Australia first’, assuming that the next war would simply be a renewal of the last. In July Miles had subscribed to the Australia First journal the Publicist, funded by W. J. Miles. What she most feared at this time was conscription.60